I have a general and quick question and since you can never get a hold of a developer at Google, I thought I would post the question here...
Can anyone tell me, if we want to use our phones to connect via USB to a missile launcher made by dream cheeky As suggested on the USB or ADK section of the developer's website, would we still need and Arduino board or a board that Google presented at Google I/O 2011?
I guess I am asking, in short, can we directly hook our phones to another device via USB, and compile a program via eclipse or with the ADK to have it run? or will we still need a board in between the phone and the device we want to connect USB...
Thanks in advance,
Richard
In ADK, the Android device acts as a USB Device and the Android accessory acts as a USB Host. When an Android accessory is attached to the Android device, the Android devices switches to "accessory mode (as described in ADK)". If your Android device has USB host already, still it will switch to accessory mode and acts as USB Device instead of USB Host. Actually, the motivation behind ADK is to make each Android device to work with any Android accessory. Accessory mode eliminates the need for USB host, since only few devices has USB host feature (It is costly).
So, if you want to work with ADK, you need an development card with USB host.
you do not need an ADK board if the device that you are connecting to your Android device is acting as the USB Device and your Android device is acting as the USB Host. This is the case with the Dream Cheeky USB missile launcher. You can connect a missile launcher directly to the device and control it. USB Host is only supported on Android 3.1 devices and later.
Related
I am creating an app (running in USB accessory mode) that will recognise when a specially made device (that I am also working on) is plugged in and connect to it.
I have written code in the app for this recognition to happen but now need to test it and the specially made device is not made yet.
So, I was wanting to test my app by somehow setting my PC up to be recognised as a usb host device that my phone can connect to, I spent a long time googling and looking for a way to do this or a different way to test this but came up empty.
How do I set my PC up in this way to test my app or what would be a good way to test this automatic usb connecting?
Thank you kindly,
EDIT:
Even the name of a cheap device that runs in android usb host mode would be sufficient as I could still just plug that into my device to check if it is working.
I think your question is how to emulate USB Host mode with the Emulator and setting up a bridge with an emulated device on the PC. This is not possible (yet).
See Emulator documentation. In the "What's not supported section" it is said that virtual hardware is not supported for USB.
I have a program on PC taking in string input from USB ( old program) I have a Android (4.X) tablet which needs to provide string input on USB to the program running on PC.
When I used the sample code on Android, following code gives empty hashmap. The PC( tried on 32 bit XP and 64 bit Windows 7) has Android driver.
mManager = (UsbManager)getSystemService(Context.USB_SERVICE);
HashMap<String, UsbDevice> devices = mManager.getDeviceList();
Any real working code example talking to PC over USB will help, pl. also point out if any driver etc. needed on Android to talk to PC.
I have tried both the Accessory mode and the host mode( just in case)
I'm not sure I exactly follow what you're doing here, but if I understand you correctly - it just won't work this way. The UsbManager.getDeviceList() is meant to be used with Android devices with USB host port, to which some USB devices are connected. But, as far as I understand, you connect Android tablet acting as a device to your PC acting as a host (I guess so, cause you wrote about driver installation).
If you want to communicate between Android USB device and some USB host (e.g. because your Android device has no USB host capabilities), you need to use accessory mode (I suggest you start with this Android Developers Blog post). But this mode requires special support on the USB host side (it must talk to the device with Android Open Accessory Protocol). Note, that getDeviceList() makes no sense in Accessory mode - first of all, connected accessory is a USB host, not a USB device, and there can be only one USB host on a USB bus.
If you want to communicate with PC using Accessory mode, you may want to try this AOAP implementation for PC. If all you need is to talk to Android device for some debugging needs, you may want to use ADB port forwarding and TCP connection instead.
I want to build a device with sensors (either with an Arduino or a homemade circuit with a microcontroller) and I want to send data from it to an Android device via an USB cable. What is the library required to connect devices via USB? Is there any documentation I could read for it? The problem is that whenever I search for this I only get results about the ADK and their board, not for other devices.
Are there things I should know beforehand? I'm not new to either field, but it's my first project with the two connected.
Thank you.
The first thing to check is if your Android device is equipped with USB host interface. In such case you can connect a regular USB device to your Android and use this API to communicate with the device.
However, typical Android device (virtually every mobile phone) is only equipped with USB device interface, for connecting to PC or another USB host. In such case you have to use the Android's USB Accessory support. The most important idea behind Android Open Accessory protocol is that it swaps (logically) USB device and USB host roles. It's the USB host that looks for the device with particular vendor/product ID, selects particular USB protocol interface, and then simply uses the in/out bulk endpoints found to communicate - pretty smart, isn't it?
To build Android Open Accessory compatible device you then need a CPU with USB host interface. If you want to use Arduino, this shield is probably a good starting point, given its firmware implements Android Open Accessory Protocol already. There are some example applications as well.
This works great on my Nexus7 which is connected over the OTG to Arduino Mega.
Android USB host serial driver library for CDC, FTDI, Arduino and other devices.
Hope it helps!
You have two solution
1: Your Arduino board act as a USB host and power the Android device.
With this solution you have to implement and USB Host stack on your Arduino board and must implement Android Open Accessory Protocol. Your Arduino board must power the Android device. Then you app must use the USB Accessory API to communicate with your board.
Avantage:
work with almost all Android Devices (no need for an USB Host port on Android device)
Disavantage:
The device board is more complicated (must provide power for both devices)
Firmware is more complicated (must implement USB Accessory mode)
2. your Arduino board act as a USB device and the Android device powers
you board.
With this solution your do not have to implement a specific USB protocol. Your board will act as a standard USB device. Since you act as a device you can power your board directly from the USB cable (the Android device will power itself and your baord). To communicate with your board you will use the USB host API of Android.
Avantage:
the device board is very simple
the firmware is simple and easier to debug (you can even test it with you PC)
Disavantage:
Works only with Android devices that have an USB Host port
On most device you will need a specific cable or adapter (ex :otg usb host cable)
I have experience with solution 2, and it works pretty well. All source code for the Android source is available from the link below. I have verified that it works with sensor devices from the company where I work on the following Android devices:
Samsung Galaxy S3
Acer Iconia tab a200
Asus Tranformer Pad TF300T
But it should work on most tablets and recent phones you can see this post if you want look at our experience.
I'm developing an Android Accessory using a Galaxy Nexus phone and the official Arduino ADK board. I'm using all the standard Arduino libraries available here. I'd like to be able to debug my Android code at runtime so I followed Googles' instructions in their "Debugging Considerations" documentation in order to do remote debugging via WiFi.
When I connect to the phone via USB I'm able to debug just fine (of course it's not talking to the Arduino board though). When I connect to the phone via WiFi I can debug just fine. However when I plug in the board to the phone it no longer auto-launches my application (that's registered with the ADK device). So instead I manually start my application but it cannot find the Arduino accessory. If I switch back to USB debugging and reconnect the ADK board to the phone it auto-launches like normal and everything is fine, but then I'm back to not being able to debug.
There are no changes to the code during all of this. All I did was change how the adb tool reaches the phone. Any guesses why the phone and my application can no longer see the ADK board?
In short:
If the phone is set to debug via USB, it can talk to the Arduino ADK with no problems.
If I invoke "adb tcpip 5555 < enter> adb connect < device-ip-address>:5555" I can remotely debug the phone with no problems.
If I now connect the ADK board to the phone with the USB cable, the phone cannot find the ADK board, but I can still do remote debugging via WiFi. That's how I know that the accessory cannot be found.
Edit:
The phone is running Android 4.1.1 and the Arduino is 1.0.1.
Just bumped into this problem, having returned to USB Accessory work. Yes there is a problem, I've no idea how to fix the problem as later versions of Android simply don't allow you to both run adb over wifi and USB Accessory at the same time. My solution and you probably got there already yourself was to root my phone, luckily a Nexus S, and down grade the Android on it to 2.3.6
It's not a great solution but to debug USB Accessory I have to boot into 2.3.6. Hopefully in the future this might work again.
Debugging USB Accessory through wifi is only possible on Nexus devices. I tried many others (Samsung's, Motorola), they don't detect accessory when USB debugging is enabled in settings. Also tried hardware usb switcher - does not help.
I found the USB docs for Android and from there it seems as if one could write a communication program on an Android phone that works exactly like on a PC.
I have a normal USB-cable that normally connects between a PC and an external device. On one end it is a normal USB on the other end it has a special plug for the device.
If I get an USB female-female adapter I could connect my normal Android phone cable USB end to my device USB cable and so basically plug in my special USB cable into the Android phone.
Does anyone have experience doing USB communcation programming on Android - basically copying normal PC USB functionality? All I would have to do is sent and receive text strings over the USB port - just like on a PC.
Is this possible or is the USB port programming on Android limited in any way
and not really identical to USB programming on a PC? eg. power supply through USB or anything else?
ps on the PC I need to have a FTDI driver installed to work with the external device.
Many thanks
UPDATE:
it seems that starting with Android 3.1 it is possible to do this - however, if I understand htis correctly, Android 3.1 runs only on tablet Android devices - I might be wrong with this - compared to Apple this all this pretty confusing (however, with Apple iPhone it will never work! ;)
Yes, Android supports USB host on 3.1 and newer, so you can connect USB devices directly to an Android device using a converter cable. Android 4.0 brings this feature to handset devices.